This is my third No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency title. While I was very pleased with the 1st volume in the series, the second one I read which was number 7 in the series, I had found less than satisfying. However, in this the 8th in the series, Alexander Smith has won me back.

Mma Ramorswe is asked by a hospital administrator to investigate why three people all died at the same time on the same day of the week in the same bed. While we are introduced to this mystery, it disappears into the background as we become involved in her assistant`s issues of satisfaction with her role at the Agency her husband`s desire to do some investigating on his own.

When the cases investigated by the other people in Mma Ramorswe life are solved, Smith returns us to the hospital case and the simple solution she comes to. It turns out that the cleaning lady was pulling the electrical cord of the ventilator out of the wall for the few minutes it took to wax the floor, the few minutes that meant death for three patients. ( )

Well, you know, nothing much ever actually happens in these books. Our heroine is called in to solve some mysterious deaths; but the answer is obvious, and anyway the culprit is not brought to justice. Another character resigns from her job; and then changes her mind. Yet another character gets a new car; but it crashes and is wrecked, though he is uninjured. Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like. ( )

I don't think there is a series that is so dependably lovely as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Books. I have restrained myself from gobbling them all up and read 1 to 2 of them a year so that I can always have a pick me up when I need it.

This installment is as good as all those that preceded it. It focuses mainly on turmoil in the workplace. this is true for the regular characters as well as the mysteries that they are seeking to solve.

I love how descriptive McCall Smith is of his characters and of Botswana. These are books that just are so filled with love for the subject and the place - they are some of my very favorites. ( )

Everything seems to be changing at the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors as both Mma Makutsi and Charlie the apprentice are looking for a change of career and even Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni wants to try his hand at being a detective.

It is useful, people generally agree, for a wife to wake up before her husband.

Quotations

Some said that they would have liked to live before the colonial era, before Europe came and carved Africa up; that, they said, would have been a good time, when Africa ran its own affairs, without humiliation. Yes, it was true that Europe had devoured Africa like a hungry man at a feast—and an uninvited one too—but not everything had been perfect before that. What if one had lived next door to the Zulus, with their fierce militarism? What if one were a weak person in the house of the strong? The Batswana had always been a peaceful people, but one could not say that about everybody. And what about medicines and hospitals? Would one have wanted to live in a time when a little scratch could turn septic and end one's life? Or in the days before dental anaesthetic? Mma Ramotswe thought not, and yet the pace of life was so much more human then and people made do with so much less. Perhaps it would have been good to live then, when one did not have to worry about money, because money did not exist; or when one did not have to fret about being on time for anything, because clocks were as yet unknown. There was something to be said for that; there was something to be said for a time when all on had to worry about was the cattle and the crops.

"Men and boys think that we would like to be them," she said. "I don't think they know how pleased we are to be women."

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.

It was so bright outside, with the winter sun beating down remorselessly, and the air thin and brittle, and everything in such clear relief. Under such light our human failures, our frailty, seemed so pitilessly illuminated. Here he was, a mechanic, not a man who was good with words, not a man of great substance, just an ordinary man, who had loved an exceptional woman and thought that he might be good enough for her; such a thought, when there were men with smooth words and sophisticated ways, men who knew how to charm women, to lure them away from the dull men who sought, so unrealistically, to possess them.

Mma Ramotswe sighed. "We cannot make all our clients happy, Mma. Sometimes, maybe. It depends on whether they want to know what we tell them. The truth is not always a happy thing, is it?"

Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the basis of the HBO TV show, and its proprietor Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, and good humor—not to mention help from her loyal assistant, Grace Makutsi, and the occasional cup of tea.

In the life of Precious Ramotswe–a woman duly proud of her fine traditional build– there is rarely a dull moment, and in the latest installment in the universally beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series there is much happening on Zebra Drive and Tlokweng Road. Mma Ramotswe is experiencing staffing difficulties. First Mr. J.L.B. Mate-koni asks to be put in charge of a case involving an errant husband. But can a man investigate such matters as successfully as the number one lady detective can? Then she has a minor falling-out with her assistant, Mma Makutsi, who decides to leave the agency, taking the 97 percent she received on her typing final from the Botswana Secretarial College with her.

Along the way, Mma Ramotswe is asked to investigate a couple of tricky cases. Will she be able to explain an unexpected series of deaths at the hospital in Mochudi? And what about the missing office supplies at a local printing company? These are the types of questions that she is uniquely well suited to answer.

In the end, whatever happens, Mma Ramotswe knows she can count on Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who stands for all that is solid and true in a shifting world. And there is always her love for Botswana, a country of which she is justifiably proud.

Detective Precious Ramotswe has her hands full with her assistant's resignation, as well as a set of cases involving unexplained deaths at a nearby hospital, an allegedly cheating husband, and thievery at a local printing company.